The Grief Recovery Method

What is grief?  The normal and natural emotional response to any change in our lives. Every change has elements of grief attached.  It can be a death, divorce, loss of a pet, change in living situation or employment or estrangement of relationships, to name but a few. The biggest problem for grievers is that both they and the people in their support system try to deal with is intellectually, rather than emotionally.  We are constantly giving them logical reasons why they should not feel their pain, but that does not make it go away. Instead it makes matters worse, since they now feel bad about feeling bad! Worse yet, no one ever teaches us effective tools, when we are growing up, to deal with emotional loss.  We are taught how to get things, rather than how to let go of them. We are taught to be socially acceptable. Our body is designed to process emotions and to express them, but most of us simply store them up inside.

The Grief Recovery Method is about taking action! We start at the beginning with why we are not bouncing back like we think we should or others tell us we should. We take an honest look at the tools we are trying to utilize to “make the pain go away” and decide if these methods are effective. We help the grievers take a look at all of the losses that they have experienced in an attempt to fully heal from the grief being experienced. We then help them discover the unfinished business in that relationship, since the emotional pain of loss is almost always related to unfinished business in the relationship – things we had wished had been “different, better or more,” and the expectations of a future that will now be very different that we had planned. It is a step by step process about exploration and taking action.  It is about completing a relationship.

Recovery is not about forgetting.  It is not about saying this relationship is not important.  It is not about “getting over it” but rather about learning how to survive and thrive in spite of it!  It is about being able to enjoy the memories, rather than have every reminder of that relationship take us down that painful road of memories of the things that might have been different, better or more!

The program is offered in two capacities: a 7 week one on one basis or an 8 week group setting. There will be two groups running in the same cycle with a max of 8 people per group.